Leaving Georgetown

Sherlock Holmes once solved a case – I believe it was the Hound of the Baskervilles – by remarking upon the dog that did NOT bark.  Traffic here in Georgetown is mostly remarkable for the thing that is missing: chaos.

Unless you have suffered the confused cacophony of Asian traffic it might mean little to you to know that these people (perhaps one of the legacies of the orderly Brits) obey traffic signals, stay in lanes, indicate turns, and – more remarkably missing than anything else – they do NOT echolocate with their horns.  The streets are relatively calm and tranquil.   

Crossing a street here is no more nerve-wracking than crossing a street in Montreal.  In fact, since these folks actually attend to the colour of traffic lights – it might be a sight safer.

The architecture wonderfully varied, but everywhere the curve.  Overhead you seldom see square corners.  It must take a great deal more effort to shape arches than to build square, yet sidewalk colonnades are arched as are many doorways and entries to public buildings.  It’s visually very pleasing. 

They take the curve motif one step further with the street corners.  Sometimes, rather than abutting at blunt right angles, the streets meet each other in gentler curves, allowing pedestrians and motorists to better see around the corners.  It would be nice to think that this softening of the edges reflected gentler human interactions generally – I guess we’ll see. 

Penang continues to delight us with little discoveries: morning on the Clan Jetties by Quay: here the Chinese have made their livings by the sea, fishing and expanding their neighbourhood out into the ocean on tall stilt houses.

But the big discovery of the day did not come until after the sun had set: Kek Lok Si Temple is the largest Buddhist temple in SE Asia – and that’s saying a lot.  Like so many things in Malaysia, it represents some considerable cooperation, with parts built by Malays, but also bits added on by Chinese and even a nice pagoda to top it off offered by the Burmese.  Fortunately, as we are here around the Chinese New Year, they continue to light the temple at night into a brilliant showcase.

 Kek Lok Si sits above the village of Air Hitam, 

lit only during a period around Chinese New Year.